Abstract
AN interesting series of experiments on the Vickers “Viking” airliner by the British European Airways Corporation in conjunction with Messrs. Vickers -Armstrong, the designers and makers of the Viking, has been brought to a successful conclusion. It has been established that the building up of ice on parts of an aircraft can be sufficient to force it down, and that the meteorological conditions necessary to cause this may possibly be met on normal everyday flights. Consequently, equipment for dealing with the trouble must be provided on all machines that are expected to carry out flights to arranged schedules and timetables. Methods already tried out for dispersing this ice are : (i) application of heat, (ii) cracking the ice by causing the surfaces to pulsate, (iii) spraying the parts with a de-icing fluid. The latter system was adopted by Messrs. Vickers-Armstrong, and the experimental machine carrying it was flown by the B.B.A.C., as operators of an air transport line, under conditions chosen to be as bad as possible. The system was tried both by allowing ice to accumulate and then dispersing it, and by keeping the apparatus working and preventing the formation of ice. The fluid is sprayed over the wings, tail and control surfaces by means of porous metal distributors inset at the leading edges. It is pumped to these and carried back over the surfaces by the airstream, and is controlled manually by the crew or automatically by an ice detector. Normal flow is on an intermittent pulsation of one 'on' and four 'off' strokes ; but in an emergency this can be increased to a continuous flow. To wet the surfaces quickly, when the system is first switched on, the normal intermittent flow is automatically preceded by a short flooding period of continuous pumping.
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Ice Accretion on Aircraft. Nature 159, 431 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159431a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159431a0